I used to believe that a writer’s mission was to tell the world important truths through stories. Talk about pressure. If you’re like me, you don’t handle pressure well. I’m generally laidback, but when I start worrying that I’m not as intentional, skilled, or efficient as I should be, my life can get wild in a hurry.
As Christian writers, stories offer us a purpose to fulfill on a daily basis, as well as a pastime that refuels our energy. Whether we’re obsessing over choosing the right theme or admiring the protagonist’s grit in our latest read, one of the reasons we’re passionate about fiction is because we know it has the power to irreversibly change lives. But sometimes we forget that God designed a unique character arc for each of us that predestined when we would meet Him and He’d begin cleansing and shaping us.
“The hero sobbed piteously over the corpse of her mentor, swearing to avenge him. After an hour of weeping, she wiped her eyes and returned to saving the world, setting her sadness aside until needed again at his gravesite.” One of my biggest complaints with fiction is how writers handle grief. While slightly exaggerated, the scene I’ve just described is similar to ones I’ve read in many published books. Grief is often treated in a farcical and clichéd manner as if it isn’t a struggle.
Have you ever loved a relationship more than the characters in it? Sure, Mr. and Mrs. Right were likable on their own, but their dynamic was so compelling that both of them dying would have been less agonizing than one of them surviving. You hope that the pairing in your own story will be equally captivating, but you’re nervous. You’ve gagged when a star-crossed guy and girl spent pages drooling over each other. What if your readers respond negatively too?
Everyone has experienced love in one form or another, so including romance lends more believability and relatability to the characters. It can offer readers a reprieve from intense and dark scenes, as well as reinforce the theme through how two flawed human beings interact. Even if romance isn’t central to the plot, a past of unrequited love, heartache, or loss can deepen your protagonist by either positively or negatively impacting how she handles situations in the present.
All writers and readers have an opinion on literary tropes—which ones they like, dislike, and think are overdone, as well as those that reserve the author (or consumer) a spot in the third circle of hell. If you’re new to the party, tropes are common literary devices or clichés. They can be phrases, situations, or images, and they’re born from familiar patterns of storytelling that audiences find compelling.
For writers, especially “serious” writers, fanfiction can feel like the elephant in the room. Everyone is aware of it, and many of us have tiptoed into it. Yet, because of the stigma that clings to it, we avoid talking about it. The genre (if it can even be classified as one) has no gatekeepers or editors, and readers often use it to extend stories they love—usually with an odd or disturbing twist. You could fill a library with all of the erotica and overdramatic depictions of the worst tropes (consider yourself warned). Several popular mainstream books-turned-films began as fanfiction, including Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Jane Austen’s delightful novel repackaged with zombies and zombie fighters) and Fifty Shades of Gray (a smutty mutation of Twilight minus the vampires).
Learning how to portray characters braving the wilderness is far more applicable than writers assume. Though it’s habitually associated with the survival niche, you don’t need to be writing a Hatchet style novel to benefit from understanding the tactics that save people when they’re fighting the elements. In historical fiction, your protagonist may flee into the woods to escape a political enemy. In speculative fiction, he may cross a desert in search of an old friend, or perhaps he gets marooned on an uninhabited planet after an intergalactic war. Whether the savage landscape is the world of your novel or merely occupies a chapter, training your imagination to picture it accurately is important.
When I enrolled in a creative writing class, participating in the assignments presented a dilemma for me. Throughout my life, I’ve gravitated to speculative fiction, because it allows me to explore extraordinary settings where bold characters and dramatic conflicts abound. After years of writing almost exclusively in that genre, its framework became second nature. Then my writing professor challenged me to confine my imagination to the real world and describe common daily experiences like drinking coffee, completing tasks at a job, and taking notes during class.
In cheap secular entertainment, the value of faith is chronically underestimated and mischaracterized as either irrational belief without evidence or arbitrary adherence to a set of dogmas. On the other side of the spectrum, Christian novels and films sometimes flaunt a cleaned-up, Sunday-best version of faith that, to be fair, is not much of an improvement on mainstream media’s interpretation—which only exacerbates the problem.
